1. Field of the Invention
In general, the present invention relates to the field of communication events in a communication system providing a variety of communication media for each user, such as video conferences, telephony, instant messaging and e-mail. Therefore, the communication system comprises a first communication device, associated with a user named Caller; a second communication device, associated with a user named Callee; and a central component, named Gatekeeper, which is connected to said first and second communication devices to mediate communication connections between Caller and Callee. Besides, said Gatekeeper is connected to or embedded in said users' workstations. More particularly, the present invention relates to the management of communications in such a communication system to reduce the impact of interruption to a user's creative work.
2. Description of the Related Art
Productivity of people can be severely degraded by unwanted interruptions. On the other hand there is the need for people to be available for important matters using various communication channels. The conflict between “uninterrupted creative work” and “ubiquitous availability” needs to be balanced.
This problem is well-known in the art and also automatic means for managing communication requests encompassing a multitude of available communication vehicles and considering the Callers requirements, the Callee's state of business and the communication medium chosen by the Caller.
Such a communications management system is described in US 2004/0255015 A1. It comprises at least one communication source representing the Caller, at least one communication recipient representing the Callee, and a communication manager as central component between communication sources and communication recipients. This communication manager is a rule-based engine having access to a general data store where the general rules and related parameters are stored and an exception data store where the exceptions to the general rules are stored. According to the US 2004/0255015 A1 the communication manager can be a network element linked to a telecommunication system and/or server. Alternately, the communication manager can be a client based application or series of applications operating within one or more computing devices. Both implementations provide a connection between the communication manager and the users' workstations.
The method for managing communication requests proposed in the US 2004/0255015 A1 is based on associating each incoming communication attempt with a unique predetermined communication event having a predetermined event weight. Communication events can be established for each communication channel, such as a telephone channel, an e-mail channel or the like. Besides, each user can establish individual communication events based on specified communication sources or Caller, respectively. Thus, it is possible to rank the Callers and to evaluate the communication medium chosen by a specific Caller. Then, the event weight of an incoming communication request is compared to an event threshold to decide what kind of communication actions to take. The event thresholds as well as the corresponding communication actions are established in an initialisation stage. However, the system allows to temporarily adjust event weights and/or event thresholds to account for the Callee's individual timetable.
Altogether, the system described in US 2004/0255015 A1 is able to protect the sphere of people who need to work uninterrupted. It allows a user to specify to what extent he is available for what kind of communication and it provides automatic means to identify important communication to be put through to the user. By defining appropriate communication actions an automatic switching between different communication channels based on user preference may be implemented.